“But the sugar districts of Louisiana are like oases in the desert.  Vacuum pans, steam cars, fine machinery and smiling faces are to be met on every hand.  Colored laborers find employment very readily in the sugar districts from October to February; and during cultivation-time, in many places, the colored laborers receive as high as one dollar and twenty cents per day, and during the grinding season, which is the harvest time, laborers receive from one dollar and twenty-five cents to one dollar and fifty cents per day in the field and seventy-five cents for one half of the night.  At this season we run the sugar machinery night and day.  I should not omit to state that colored men are, in the majority of cases, employed as engineers at our sugar mills, and receive from two to two and a half dollars per day: 

“You will be surprised when I tell you that the most of the bricklaying and plastering work, and the blacksmithing and carpentering work is done in the sugar districts by colored men, who average three dollars per day for their work.

“There are fifty-eight parishes in Louisiana, twenty-four of them being sugar districts.  To illustrate the degree of toleration which obtains in the cotton and sugar growing districts, take the following statement:  In the Louisiana House of Representatives there are thirteen colored members—­all from the sugar districts; in the Senate there are four colored members—­all from the sugar districts.  This condition of things is readily accounted for by the fact that the colored people in the sugar districts are more generally tax payers than they are in the cotton districts, and, having mutual interests, both white and black are more tolerant and better informed.  The Bulldozer and White Liner can find but little room to ply their nefarious work where everybody finds plenty of work that pays well, and where material prosperity is the first and political bickering the secondary consideration.  Because of the mutual interests at stake, colored men in the sugar districts are often protected by their bitterest political opponents.

“The State of Louisiana is assessed at $200,000,000, of which her colored population pay taxes upon more than $30,000,000.—­Two thirds of this is owned by colored men in the sugar districts.”

I could multiply quotations, but they would serve only to confirm my view, that the colored man merely requires time to fully comprehend his freedom and his opportunities, to enjoy the ample immunities of the first and to improve to the utmost the advantages of the second.  All over the country the colored man is coming to understand that if he is ever to have and enjoy a status in this country at all commensurate with that of his white fellow-citizens, he must get his grip upon the elements of success which they employ with such effect, and boldly enter the lists, a competitor who must make a way for himself.  Dr. Marshall says truly:  “The Negro is neither a beggar,